"[1][2][3] On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions.

[13] In Boston, Hamilton initially intended to enroll in graduate study in abstract mathematics at Brandeis University.

At the time, computer science and software engineering were not yet established disciplines; instead, programmers learned on the job with hands-on experience.

[14] From 1961 to 1963, Hamilton worked on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project at the MIT Lincoln Lab,[16] where she was one of the programmers who wrote software for the prototype AN/FSQ-7 computer (the XD-1), used by the U.S. Air Force to search for possibly unfriendly aircraft.

[19]It was her efforts on this project that made her a candidate for the position at NASA as the lead developer for Apollo flight software.

[25] She was responsible for the team writing and testing all on-board in-flight software for the Apollo spacecraft's Command and Lunar Module and for the subsequent Skylab space station.

[18][20] These techniques are intended to make code more reliable because they help programmers identify and fix errors sooner in the development process.

Her "priority display" innovation had created a knock-on risk that astronaut and computer would slip out of synch just when it mattered most.

As the alarms went off and priority displays replaced normal ones, the actual switchover to new programmes behind the screens was happening "a step slower" than it would today.

The computer was overloaded with interrupts caused by incorrectly phased power supplied to the lander's rendezvous radar.

[33][34][35] The program alarms indicated "executive overflows", meaning the guidance computer could not complete all of its tasks in real time and had to postpone some of them.

[40] Jack Garman, a NASA computer engineer in mission control, recognized the meaning of the errors that were presented to the astronauts by the priority displays and shouted, "Go, go!"

If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.

In 1976, Hamilton co-founded with Saydean Zeldin a company called Higher Order Software (HOS)[43] to further develop ideas about error prevention and fault tolerance emerging from their experience at MIT working on the Apollo program.

[51] In 1980, British-Israeli computer scientist David Harel published a proposal for a structured programming language derived from HOS from the viewpoint of and/or subgoals.

[66] USL was created after her knowledge and experience from the Apollo mission, in which she determined a mathematical theory for systems and software.

According to Wired's Karen Tegan Padir: "She, along with that other early programming pioneer, COBOL inventor Grace Hopper, also deserve tremendous credit for helping to open the door for more women to enter and succeed in STEM fields like software.

"[69][70] In 2017, a "Women of NASA" LEGO set went on sale featuring minifigures of Hamilton, Mae Jemison, Sally Ride, and Nancy Grace Roman.

The mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility were configured to create a picture of Hamilton and the Apollo 11 by moonlight.

[73] Margo Madison, a fictional NASA engineer in the alternate history series For All Mankind, was inspired by Hamilton.